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Patriot Reign: Bill Belichick, the Coaches, and the Players Who Built a Champion
Ratings:
272 pages4 hours
Summary
When Bill Belichick arrived in New England, the Patriots were a laughingstock, an organization with a losing record and a roster of overpaid, underperforming players. So how did a head coach with a questionable record transform this team, garner three Lombardi trophies in four years, and -- with the Pats' 2005 Super Bowl win over the Philadelphia Eagles -- cement the team's place as an NFL dynasty?
With unprecedented access granted by Belichick and his staff, author Michael Holley spent two years with the coach, his team, and his brain trust. Holley provides insights into how Belichick and his coaching cabinet prepare for opponents, evaluate talent, run the draft, and design their offensive and defensive schemes. Patriot Reign captures Belichick at his most candid, and what emerges is a portrait of a complicated man who is cerebral, yes, but also tough, demanding, stubborn, funny, profane, and a master strategist.
Frank, uncompromising, and stunning, Patriot Reign is required reading for football fans who want to understand what makes a champion tick
.Publisher: HarperCollinsReleased: Mar 17, 2009ISBN: 9780061749193Format: book
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Patriot Reign - Michael Holley
INTRODUCTION
Two years ago I sat in Bill Belichick’s office and talked with him about an idea I had for a book. I told the head coach of the New England Patriots that I was interested in examining several aspects of NFL culture through the eyes of his organization. It would be a book that would give readers an access pass to places from which they are usually forbidden. They would be able to see candid glimpses of a team, from ownership to coaching to playing. They would sit in meeting rooms, watch games from the coaches’ box, learn about scouting, and ultimately better understand the cerebral man who is often called the best coach in the National Football League.
Belichick listened to the proposal and rubbed his forehead. Not wanting to hear his answer then, I kept talking.
I was a general sports columnist for the Boston Globe at the time, so I wanted to assure him that such a project would require a one-year leave from the paper. It would be impossible for me to immerse myself in the NFL for most of the day and continue to write a column in the remaining hours. The coach needed to be convinced, for example, that his private conversations with head trainer Jim Whalen would not wind up as part of my sports discussions in print or on the air. I told him that I wouldn’t do any media work while the Patriots were in season.
After I finished my pitch, Belichick sat in the chair, with his right foot touching the floor and his left heel on the edge of the seat. He was quiet for what seemed like five minutes.
I’ll have to talk with Robert about it,
he said finally, referring to team owner Robert Kraft. But it sounds good to me.
It wasn’t exactly what I had expected to hear; I was sure he was going to say No, thanks.
Belichick talked with Kraft, and I was given permission to shadow the team. What followed was one of the most educational, entertaining, and humbling years of my life. I was able to sit in corners and observe the think tank that is football operations in Foxboro, Massachusetts. I quickly noticed that under Belichick the Patriots have one of the most unusual workplaces in America. It is difficult to find the office slacker who turns instant messaging into a full-time job. Belichick has surrounded himself with smart, competent people who are encouraged to be original thinkers—so original that if their analyses are different from those of the boss, they are encouraged to disagree with him. Belichick has no problem listening to any counterargument—provided that it can be supported with some type of evidence.
As I sat in those corners, trying to blend in and take notes at the same time, I kept waiting for someone to ask me to leave that out of the book. There was usually an explicit description in a meeting, and a few times there were energetic exchanges between coaches. But the tap on the shoulder never came from anyone in the organization. I was sure it was going to come in January 2003, when an agitated Belichick began talking about his defensive backs in a player evaluation meeting. He had expected more out of a unit that included Lawyer Milloy, Tebucky Jones, and Victor Green. He saw their performance one way—not good—and defensive backs coach Eric Mangini was on the other side of the argument. With voices raised, they both defended their positions. Mangini insisted that Green was one of the best playmakers on the team, and Belichick said he was too slow. They went back and forth until Belichick asked Josh McDaniels, who was a coaching assistant at the time, to go to the computer system. He wanted McDaniels to retrieve some plays from the Buffalo game.
Which Buffalo game, Coach?
McDaniels asked.
Either one,
Belichick said. There’s enough bad shit to look at in either game.
The exchange between Belichick and Mangini lasted for about ten minutes. And then it was over. There is very little carryover in Foxboro. You say what needs to be said, and then you move on. I had become accustomed to the intense football operations culture, and it had become accustomed to me. That was obvious when Belichick introduced a new quarterbacks coach, John Hufnagel, to the staff in 2003.
John, you’ve met everyone here, right?
Belichick said.
Yes,
Hufnagel replied. Everyone but the gentleman in the corner.
He was talking about me. After my presence caused some early awkward moments, I had become part of the wallpaper. Oh, him?
a couple of the coaches laughed. That’s just Michael.
After the Patriots finished the 2002 season with a 9–7 record, a few players and coaches were almost apologetic about what would become of the book. They knew that the story of a nonplay-off team, one season removed from winning Super Bowl XXXVI, wouldn’t excite many publishers. I told them that I was going to continue to work on it, and that everything could be salvaged if the Patriots could find a way to win Super Bowl XXXVIII. Even though it wasn’t part of the initial plan, Belichick never cut off my access as the 2002 season became the 2003 season. Every once in a while he would ask, How’s the book?
and I would answer with a sigh.
That changed in October 2003, when the Patriots won their first of fifteen consecutive games. Indeed, they capped the season with a win over the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl XXXVIII. Well,
Belichick said then. I don’t have to ask you about the book now. It looks like you have it.
Boston, 2004
CHAPTER 1
THE ART OF THE GAME
Bill Belichick has moments that few people see or imagine, moments when he is no longer the premier strategist of his profession. These are the times when he could be the guy in the next cubicle, any other father, husband, or son. These breaks from brilliance make him a stronger coach. They remind him that briefly stepping away from his football vision can actually allow him to see more of it.
There are times when the diagrammed plays on the erasable board in his office are for an audience of two—his sons, Stephen and Brian. There are times when the brainteasers he attempts to solve are provided by members of his family, not by other coaches. Do you know what ‘discrete’ means?
he said one day after a conversation with Brian. His younger son—who attends Brookline’s Dexter School, John F. Kennedy’s alma mater—was studying vocabulary words. Discrete
was one of them. It’s not the same as ‘discreet,’
Belichick said. Brian’s class is going over words that have similar sounds with different meanings. That’s a good one.
There was the time he tried to put on one of his favorite sweaters and could barely get it over his shoulders. Laundry mistake. He called his wife, Debby, to talk about it. He heard a lot of laughter coming from the phone. It’s not funny,
he said with a smirk, even though he knew it was.
What most surprises people who don’t know him is how much he enjoys a good laugh, usually when he’s away from work and sometimes when he’s at it. He earned a reputation for giving bland descriptions during his press conferences, where his personality is the sacrifice to protecting the goods. Press conferences are part of his game plans— he prepares for them at least fifteen to twenty minutes per day—so he is especially conscious of saying or implying anything that will give an opponent an edge. By the time he walks into his morning briefings with the New England media, he has already broken them down. He has predicted the incendiary topics of the day, sketched an outline of how he will respond to those topics, and offered suggestions to his players on how they should respond too. He has mastered an indifferent look during these conferences, yet when they are over he can easily recall details about late-arriving reporters, opinion-makers he hasn’t seen in a while, and questioners he didn’t recognize. When his conversation is no longer on the record, it’s as if some hidden masseuse has suddenly relieved him of tension points.
He can be relaxed during television production meetings, depending on the broadcast crew for the game. He’s been extremely loose with Phil Simms, Greg Gumbel, and Armen Keteyian of CBS. He trusts them enough to joke with them. Once he went into a meeting seeing if he could needle Simms. Phil, I’ve heard you’ve been ripping the shit out of me,
he said to the former Giants quarterback. That’s all I hear from people: ‘Simms is ripping your ass during the broadcast.’
Simms didn’t fall for it. He knew that Belichick wouldn’t leave anything to hearsay and that if he had indeed ripped Belichick, the coach would know exactly when it happened, down and distance included. Bullshit,
Simms said. All I do is talk about how smart you are. We call you the smartest coach ever every week.
Belichick laughed, leaned back in his chair, and acted as if he were getting ready for a card game with his friends.
It helps that Simms has known Belichick since 1979, but that’s not the only reason Belichick respects him and his crew. He is even more impressed with their preparation. They are often dressed casually in these meetings— T-shirts, baseball caps, flip-flops—but they always have a plan for what is going to be discussed. Simms is indeed their quarterback, so they all watch film and jot down observations to present to Belichick. Their hard work makes him so comfortable that he often sits in the meetings, feet propped up, telling stories. He once told them that he ran a marathon and was spotted by Giants fans. They saw me, and one fan says, ‘Look, there’s Belichick of the Giants. They still don’t have a running game!’
On some days when things are quiet at Gillette Stadium—after the Saturday morning walk-through and before the Saturday evening coaches’ meeting—Belichick is visited by one of his three dogs. Sometimes he entertains Tom Brady—a sports fan with an appreciation of sports history—by telling tales about the old Giants. He once called defensive lineman Richard Seymour into his office so they could watch tape and talk about some of the dominant players of the NFC East in the 1980s.
He may have been born in Tennessee and raised in Maryland, but he’s got a lot of Northeast humor in him. He can be clever, sarcastic, and profane. Coming from his office it’s not unusual to hear the voices of Frank Rizzo and Sol Rosenberg, the characters dreamed up by the Jerky Boys, the notorious telephone pranksters from Queens. When he isn’t listening to their funny stories, he tells a few of his own. He tells one about a family vacation in Europe in the mid-1990s. No matter where they went, the Belichicks saw dozens of Europe’s aged churches. They saw landmarks and a certain recurring icon. At one point Brian turned to his parents and said, Who is this guy? We’re seeing him everywhere.
The guy
was Jesus Christ.
I don’t know if I should tell that story,
Belichick says, shaking his head. People are going to think we’re bad parents.
He has gone from twenty-six-year-old coach-peer to fifty-two-year-old coach-teacher. He has learned to be more of a negotiator with his own team, making compromises in some areas—or at least being able to listen—without selling out his core beliefs. He no longer has to worry about the potential conflicts of interest that he encountered in Baltimore, Detroit, Denver, and the early days of New York. He was a young coach then, either the same age or just a couple of years older than the players who reported to him. He has an understanding and respect for issues now that he didn’t after the 1989 season, when he had his first head-coaching interview. The Phoenix Cardinals were interested in talking to him then. The team had moved from St. Louis one year earlier, and ownership wanted someone who would go from city to city in Arizona, helping to promote the team.
I didn’t realize how much they were looking for that,
Belichick says. You know, I figured winning would generate the interest as opposed to going out and doing little rallies.
It’s not what the Cardinals wanted to hear. They gave the job to Joe Bugel. It would be years before Belichick would develop a head coach’s scope of vision, years before he would see that planning the issues around the game is as important as planning the game itself.
Let’s put it this way: when you’re the head coach, you’re the head coach twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No matter what happens, it’s on your watch and, to a degree, it’s your problem,
he says. It doesn’t matter what. Some guy can run a stop sign and get pulled over by the police, and they’re calling you. If the fertilizer doesn’t come and the grass is going to be brown, you might get a call, ‘What are we going to do?’ It’s everything.
Early in his head-coaching career he couldn’t resist obsessing over minutiae. He would sit in on the Cleveland Browns’ defensive meetings and talk about how a pattern should be covered. He would pop into special-teams meetings and talk about punt-protection techniques. He would map out the offensive game plan because, for two seasons, he was also his team’s offensive coordinator. He was a coaching phenom, a young fastballer who didn’t know how to change speeds. The joy to him then, at thirty-nine, was the pure rush of coaching. It was the ideal of coaching in a vacuum, having a vision with no periphery required. But it really was an ideal. Thinking like a football CEO is part of the job. Allowing the media glimpses of the team and being cooperative in the daily dance with them is part of the job. He underestimated the importance of that in Cleveland, and he was generally resented for it.
"When I got there, there had been a very open media policy from previous regimes. They had open practices, open locker rooms, pretty much whatever they wanted, to the point where the players really had no privacy. You know, a guy would play a joke on somebody or say something and it would be in the paper the next day. There was no real opportunity for the team to build much of its own personality or chemistry because that stuff was reported on a daily basis.
"I clamped down on them. It could have been done in a more positive or gracious way. I could have made some concessions so that it wouldn’t have come off as being so harsh. I take responsibility for it. But the bottom line was we just didn’t win quickly enough. The media logic was ‘Okay, you want to come in and close practices and limit our access and give us some short answers? You had better start putting up some wins.’ And when that didn’t happen, with three consecutive losing seasons, there wasn’t a great defense mechanism built up there.
But I was kind of oblivious to that too. Because I really was more concerned about coaching the team than trying to be a PR machine.
Back then he didn’t have someone taping the Sunday night wrap-up shows on local TV, as he does now. Unlike today, he didn’t have a thick pack of local and national newspaper clips that he would read as he worked out on a treadmill. He didn’t have someone to not only monitor the discussions on sports-talk radio but also filter the volume and give him any items of significance. He didn’t have radio personalities and columnists freely saying In Bill We Trust,
as is the case in New England. He had more to prove then, in an organization that would prove to be less competent and unified than the one he’s in now.
For Belichick, there was always the game. But with each addition to his personal and professional timeline, he began to see it from new angles. A lot happened in the twenty years between his ambitious start in Baltimore in 1975 and his employer’s shocking announcement that it was moving to Baltimore—he guessed that the moving trucks would take off without him—in 1995. One day in his early twenties he is living at Howard Johnson’s and driving Baltimore Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda to work. Then one day in his late thirties he is flying into Cleveland and being shuttled to the Ritz Carlton, where Browns hats and sweatshirts are lying on his bed. He and Debby join Art Modell and his wife, Pat, at the Modells’ home for dinner. Bill and Art go into the den, shape a contract, and agree to terms that will make him the coach of the Browns. Then one day in his early forties, one of the strangest days he’s ever had, he learns midseason that his team is moving and finds himself calling a member of the media for insight.
He looked in the Boston Globe on November 4, 1995, and saw an article headlined Browns Look to Baltimore.
Will McDonough broke the story and began it by writing, The Baltimore Browns. Get used to it.
McDonough wrote that an announcement would be made in two days, on Monday, the day before the NFL owners were scheduled to meet in Dallas. "I saw the article and I’m thinking, Wow. I talked to Will, and Will said, ‘Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. This is what’s going to happen.’ Will had some good inside information. So that really kind of sent the antennas up. The lame-duck Browns had a home game the next day against Houston and were crushed, 37–10. They lost seven of their final eight games.
Modell" became a six-letter obscenity in Cleveland.
Four months after the announcement, Belichick was dismayed, though not surprised, when news of his job status was finally delivered. He knew he was going to be fired. It was the delivery of his firing that was problematic. I’m sure there were things that I did that Art wasn’t thrilled with, but I worked hard for him. I spent a lot of hours there, and I tried to do what was best for the team. And in typical Art fashion, five years later, it was just a phone call.
During that call Belichick debated Modell on the wording of the proposed firing statement to the media. Belichick didn’t like the way the document was phrased. He thought the statement was one-sided, a piece of propaganda that attempted to place all the organization’s problems at his feet. He looked over the announcement and warned Modell, If you release this statement, I’m going to release one and you’re not going to like it. So let’s try to come up with something that we can both live with.
The statement was changed. Both the Browns and Belichick would be moving. Marchibroda was going to return to Baltimore as coach of the new Ravens. And Belichick was going to pack his van and drive to New England. Miami Dolphins head coach Jimmy Johnson had talked with him about becoming defensive coordinator of the Dolphins, but Belichick had loved New England since prep school and college. He had homes on Nantucket, he had friends from high school and college in the area, and Bill Parcells had promised him a job as one of his Patriots assistants. Over the course of the next four years he would follow Parcells to the New York Jets as his defensive coordinator and assistant head coach, then return to New England, this time as head coach.
Maybe some people in Andover, Massachusetts, would have found this ironic in 1971. Maybe they would have been surprised to know that the long-haired center on the undefeated football team would one day be forty miles south, in Foxboro, the man with final say in football operations. But it wouldn’t have seemed unusual to a nineteen-year-old Bill Belichick. Even at Andover he was a little different from the other students.
He listened to the Dead, James Taylor, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel, as many of them did. He took similar classes and got similar grades—As and Bs—although it didn’t come naturally to him. When I walked into Andover, I was surrounded by a lot of people who were a whole lot smarter than I was,
he says. "And they knew a lot more than I did on
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